Things you'll need to decide on as you plan: Resultant Force sets Acceleration

Bringing together two sets of constraints

Focusing on the learners:

Distinguishing–eliciting–connecting. How to:

• idealise from everyday experiences the lived-in world to develop the idea of a natural motion
• distinguish between everyday motions of the lived-in world and the idealised world of Newtonian mechanics
• draw out children's ideas of force and motion
• reactivate, and then use children's prior learning

Teacher Tip: These are all related to findings about children's ideas from research. The teaching activities will provide some suggestions. So will colleagues, near and far.

Focusing on the physics:

Representing–noticing–recording. How to:

• represent idealised motions as natural motions in a frictionless world
• deal with remote causes—action at a distance forces
• introduce mass, and not conflated with quantity of matter

Teacher Tip: Connecting what is experienced with what is written and drawn is essential to making sense of the connections between the theoretical world of physics and the lived-in world of the children. Don't forget to exemplify this action.